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Mobile Applications

Smart View cannot be started in the Samsung Flow Windows 10 app though Samsung Flow indicates “Device connected”

Like an issue I described in a previous post this issue only appears when you resume your PC/laptop from a hibernated state

If you’re affected by this problem the Samsung Flow Windows 10 app will attempt to connect to your mobile phone after you click on the “Smart View” option but will then display 4 spinning coloured dots and finally fail to connect to your phone

If you restart your laptop then launch Samsung Flow and try the “Smart View” option in the app you should then be able to reconnect to your mobile phone

Can’t get Your Phone Companion to connect to Windows 10

If you run into this issue there’s a simple fix to re-initiate the connection to Windows 10 if for any reason you’ve had to reinstall the Your Phone Companion app on your phone or had to reinstall the Your Phone app on Windows 10

If your phone indicates it’s “Reconnecting to PC” but never connects the below instructions should fix this issue

Go into Settings – Apps – Your Phone Companion

Select the Storage option then click on Clear Data

Launch the Your Phone Companion app once more and it should now be able to connect to your Windows 10 PC again

The above instructions may differ depending on phones manufacturer

iPhone – Can’t access the internet while roaming?

If you can’t access the internet while roaming outside your home country the issue may be down to a new switch enabled in iOS8.

It was supposed to allow roaming without any extra charges in any EU country but it doesn’t do exactly what it says on the tin…

Find and disable “EU Internet” in your iPhone mobile settings and this should allow you to access the internet again. Or you could just use an Android phone…

Building my first Mobile Application with Tiggzi

 

Tiggzi

I decided to look into how easy it would be to build an app.

Bearing in mind that I’ve no experience programming mobile applications I had a look to see if there were any drag and drop based code design environments.

I discovered Tiggzy and right away I could see it contained some powerful design features. Here’s a list of the highlights.

  1. Cross compatibility with Android, Windows Phone, iOS so you can build the app once and it can run on all three platforms
  2. Completely online design environment – no need to install Eclipse, XCode etc on your PC/Mac
  3. Drag and drop UI design features

You can access my very first Android app here

Skydrive – A great way to sync your files across all devices

I’ve had a hotmail account since the service first came out in 1996 – it was the “fashionable” web mail client to use until G-Mail landed at which point my hotmail account started gathering internet dust bunnies.

I’ve now found a reason to go back though thanks to SkyDrive – Hotmail’s Cloud service.

SkyDrive has seen many iteration’s and re-incarnations with names such as Live Mesh, Live Sync etc but this version seems to do exactly what it says on the tin. For a free service (with 7GB of cloud storage) the performance is great (compared to how it used to be under the Live Sync name) and it’s compatible with iPhone and iPad via a free app, so you can sync your files across Win7, OSX, iOS and  WP7.

There’s no official Microsoft app for Android yet but there is a 3rd party Browser for Skydrive app available for the Android platform.

I’ve had no problems with the service at work either. Our proxy server hasn’t interrupted the service or prevented me accessing my Skydrive files at any time during the past month I’ve had the application installed on my Win7 PC so it’s a thumbs up all round.

Try it out

Problem with Direct Access and Vodafone 3G/HSDPA – Update. SEP is the problem

I found the source of our Direct Access problems back in May during a lull period at work. Sorry for not updating then guys…

Here’s a link to my previous Direct Access post

I had a suspicion our anti-virus may have been causing our Direct Access problem so I went ahead and removed Symantec Endpoint Protection using CleanWipe which you can find here

I’m not that big a fan of Symantec as we had problems with our previous generation of PC’s – we suspected it was causing random out of the blue power downs of some PC’s while users were working. We could never prove it though as no event viewer logs were recorded just before the PC’s powered down unexpectedly. Luckily we’ve not had any problems of this type on our current generation of PC’s – they do have a new version of SEP installed though! In hindsight I should have tried removing SEP to test with Direct Access sooner in light of my previous experience with Symantec.

Anyway – Back to Direct Access. Once SEP was uninstalled with MS Security Essentials replacing it – Direct Access started behaving as it should on our laptops over a HSDPA/3G connection, and I didn’t have to run the “netsh interface 6to4 set state disabled” command  indicated in my previous post anymore.

I then decided to do  some more digging on the subject once I realised SEP was causing the problem and found this little nugget from a Symantec forum post.

So if you’re thinking about deploying Direct Access and have SEP deployed you have three choices:

1. Wait for the SEP update to come out in August 2012.

2. Uninstall SEP and replace with an antivirus that works with Direct Access (might be workable if you’ve only a small group of users that need to use Direct Access) i.e. replace AV for that group and leave the others with SEP.

3. Create a batch file that will run the “netsh interface 6to4 set state disabled” on start up on each laptop.

Hope this helps guys

 

High iPhone bills

Two users at work were shocked to receive bills recently well over amounts normal users would incur.

Both were down to data usage even though those users had not used their iPhone data service in any significant way, preferring to use wifi to connect at home.

That can be a big problem if you’re a new iPhone user living in Ireland where we don’t have unlimited data plans like in the US.

If you’ve encountered this problem you need to look at the apps that are running in the background on your iPhone.

It’s not really advertised by Apple a lot but when starting another app on your iPhone the last one you were using will still run in the background unless you’ve closed it down. These location-based, e-mail, update or streaming media apps could all be running in the background eating through your data plan without you knowing it.

These apps may also be draining your battery unnecessarily.

To solve this double-click on the menu button twice in quick succession. You can now see the full list of apps that are running in the background toward the bottom of the screen. Now press and hold on one of those icons until they start to shake and you can see a minus symbol in the top right hand corner of those apps. Click on the minus symbol on each app to close.

iOS doesn’t give you a way to close apps from the applications themselves or close all background running apps at once without jail-breaking your phone so you’ll have to go through each one and close. That or restart your iPhone

iPhone issue – Server error Contact your server administrator Cannot get mail

Got the above error message on a users iPhone today – It was easy for me to trouble shoot as the user also uses an iPad and indicated he was also having problems downloading mail on that device.

Symptoms: When the iPhone mail app is accessed a notification appears towards the bottom for a number of seconds indicating “Downloading” but no new e-mails are downloaded and after a few more seconds the “Server error – Contact your server administrator – Cannot get mail” error message appears.

If you’ve already tried adding/removing the ActiveSync account details (and all the other recommended troubleshooting steps) and your device still cannot download e-mail – go back to the day your iPhone/iPad stopped receiving mail in Outlook (or whatever desktop client you normally use) and delete all mails from that day. Also empty your “Deleted Items” to be safe.

Your device cannot download new e-mails because one of the e-mails you’ve received has become corrupted and is now holding up other mails in the queue.

Once you’ve deleted the corrupted mail you should then be able to download the newer ones.

The Blog of Martin Birrane